Transcripts For CSPAN3 Forum Focuses On U.S. Navy Maintenance Challenges 20170606

From the center for strategic and international studies, this is an hour and 15 minutes. We are going to get started. Good morning, everyone. Im a senior fellow here in the International Security program at csis. And im delighted to kick off the Maritime Security dialogue with vice admiral moore. This is acosishosted series. And it seeks to highlight current thinking and future challenges facing the navy, the marine corps and the coast guard. Today represents our second dialogue for 2017 and we look forward to welcome you all back for additional events throughout the year. We would also like to thank in a special way, Lockheed Martin and huntington engles in make this series possible. And before we get underway for big events like this we also like to make just a brief announcement. Safety announcement. We dont expect any difficulties, but should there be anything as convenor, make sure you know, we have exits here in the back on both sides and stairs down the front and both myself and anthony bell in the back will be your responsible officers to direct you in the right way just in case anything should come up, just look for one of us. So for our formal introduction to get us started, i will turn over to vice admiral peter daly, retired, the chief executive officer of the u. S. Naval institute. Were happy to have him here and partner with us i. Okay, welcome, those who dont know me, pete daily, ceo naval institute. We are proud to bring you this maritime dialogue series continuation in our third year and as mentioned, we give special recognition to our sponsors, huntington engles and Lockheed Martin for make this event possible. Our speaker for today, 1981 graduate of the academy, also holds degrees from George Washington university, and a Naval Nuclear engineering degree from m. I. T. After serving 13 years as a Nuclear Propulsion qualified Surface Warfare officer, he made lateral transfer to the duty officer community. There he served and focused on refueling, complex overhauls of Aircraft Carriers. Major command include Major Program manager for inservice Aircraft Carriers and Program Executive officer for submarines, peos, subs. Finally last year in june, vice admiral tom moore assumed command as the 44th commander as navc. I point out there are 77,000 employees of navc. It is responsible for the contracting and supervision of all navy and sub ship building and the maintenance of all those ships directly. We welcome the admiral who controls one quarter of the navy budget. [ applause ] thanks, pete. Im always reminded of that, by the way, you have one quarter of the budget. Thats not necessarily a good thing. Good morning and thank you for the invite this morning. Last night but a big night for the navy. Number one, my band played on the waterfront. And then what was the other thing that went on last night . The other thing we delivered the ford to the navy. Kind of a big night for us. It was a big night for us having worked on ford for most of the past 10 years. Just came back from a successful acceptance trial and the navy accepted delivery of the ford last night. You heard it here first. Thanks for the opportunity to come talk this morning. The theme that i was given was the maintenance challenge and how to reset the fleet. So what i would like do is talk about this in kind of the context of where the cno is headed and the size of the fleet. And what we are doing to grow the size of the fleet on the Construction Side and then talk about how the maintenance side of the equation fits in. It is not either. You have to do both. So sometimes we tend to forget about that, having been a ship buildi builder for most of the last 15 years, but having spent most of the last year on sea readiness, i am well aware of that to do both. If you have not read the sea notes white paper, it is a good read. A short, it has pictures in it. It is great for command master chiefs. Their lips do not get tired when they read it. And the cnos white paper talks about what the current security environment is. They make three key points. They are applicable whether you are talking construction or whether youre talking the maintenance side of the house. The three key points are time matters. There has to be a sense of urgency in some of the things were getting after today. That applies across the board. To figuring out how you design these ships quicker and build them quicker. The pace today is exponential. If you look at the world and the threats that were facing, the learning thats going on in our competitors, say, russia and china, and the pace they are changing their capability is growing establishment growing exponentially. It is like we went into halftime up 283 and said the game is over. The referee said halftime is over, we said, we will get there when we get there, and strolled out through the Third Quarter to find the score was now 2824. That capability gap between us and our competitors has really closed and its a really keen interest to us on the navy side of the house in terms of what is the capability we need Going Forward. There is a lot of discussion going on about, what is the navy that we need . Not necessarily what is the navy we need in the 2040s but what is the navy we need in the 2020s . We are trying to figure out, what is the navy that we need in the mid20s. And go make some decisions based on kind of that navy we need in the 2020s. There have been a number of recent studies some done by the navy, and some by independent groups about what is the navy and what should it look like . They have various mixes of ships and stuff but in the end they all came to the same conclusion we need a bigger navy than we have today and they are all around the 340 to 350 ships. Clearly the size of the fleet matters and the capability of the fleet matters as well. How do we get there . When we talk about the size of fleet and i know ill get questions about how the 18 budget didnt add a bunch of new ships, what happened . We were never going to be able to turn that around overnight. I think what youre going to see and ill get to it later in my remarks is the 18 budget holds what we have on the new Construction Side but makes a significant investment on the ready new zealand side of the house. If you listen to the vice chiefs testimony, he says the first dollar we get should go to readiness. I think thats what youre seeing in the 18 budget. We spent a lot of time talking about the strategy, the future navy white paper, it all goes to what the navys strategy is Going Forward. And its easy to say having been in washington, d. C. Now since 1999 i tell people im on my 18th palm which is kind of hard to imagine. If i had a dollar every time someone said we need to build the Strategy First and the strategy will drive the budget. In the world that we live in that sounds great but the reality of it you dont want a budget completely driving your strategy but you cannot ignore the fact that we live in a fiscally constrained environment. What we like to say is we have a resort informed strategy. We will increase the builds of the ships we have today. We think the Industrial Base can probably build in the next seven years, 29 more ships than we had in the original 310ship plan. We have to figure out where the curve of the dollar is, and we have to figure out how to innovate, and what we are going to work on the new Construction Side of the house. We will continue building edgs, the amphibs that we have today. There is ongoing discussion on lcs and the frigate that is still kind of churning around inside the pentagon and we owe some answers to the congress here later in the summer on that. As we head out further out and if you heard me talk about this future service combatant, thats going to be critically important as well. The new buzz word inside navc and the pentagon is s. W. A. P. , space, weight, and power. As we go toward the future navy, i can tell you that one of the things that is really important as we build these platforms, is to make sure that they have enough space, weight, and power so that you can modernize and adapt to future threats. We are in an age of electric ships and fordclass carriers are prime examples of building in space, weight, and power into the platform so you can adapt and go forward. And interestingly, the ddg 51 class which is around today and serving well, we are going to provide a little bit more space and a little bit more power in that Going Forward and those ships are kind of unique in their ability to stay around. It was interesting, my First Department head was on the uss cunningham we used to get rid of ships around the 25year point. We didnt do maintenance. Anyone who served on a ddg knows they were tough to maintain. But we didnt spend any money at the maintenance side. At the 25year point people would think we need to get rid of these things because theyre rust buckets. The reality is, from a common sense standpoint, they were obsolete. Fastforward to today, take a look at open architecture and spy radar and vertical launch and now you have a platform that can stay around a lot longer. So now we have to kind of shift the thought process now. Back over to the maintenance side of the house and now, if you want to get more service life for the hull you have to do the maintenance on it. And admiral daly and i when i first became a flag officer in 2008 we had kind of reached this epiphany where we had not spent any money on doing maintenance for about ten years and we woke up one morning and realized we are failing auto these in serves we do not have ships to get to their expected service life. In hindsight, it does not take a Rocket Scientist to realize if you do not make investments on the maintenance side, you cannot get to where you want to. We had gone for 10 year saying. Not doing maintenance and saving that money is working. The reality is we were consuming the service life of the ships that was built into them and it caught up with us. We spent the last eight to nine years digging ourselves out of that hole. One of the key components of getting out to the size of the fleet that we need is taking the ddgs and the cgs and the amphibs we have today and extending the service lives of these ships. Most of them are in the 35 year range. What would it take to get them out another 10 years . For a steel hull, if you do the maintenance, you can get the service life out much longer. And with todays open architecture and vertical launch i think theres great opportunity for us to make the investment. A relatively small investment, to keep the ships around longer than we have today. People say we have never gone with a service ship beyond 35 years but i point out all the time that we have taken aircrafts routinely to 50 years. We know how to do this. And i think what youre going to see is were going the take a very serious look at taking the service life of the existing fleet and extending it out five to ten years. If you do that, and you have seen some of the Structure Assessments which gets us to 350 ships around 2045 if you keep ships at their Current Service lives and build new, we can probably get them from 35 to another 15 years. Will take a close look at that. One of the things i have consistently pointed out as we look at the new frig oooo gat design is we should not design a ship with a planned service life of 25 to 30 years. It doesnt make any sense. We should plan service lives of 40plus years for all of our ships and build into the context, the space, weight, and power Going Forward. The last thing that i want to talk about is the maintenance side of the house. And resetting the fleet. If you heard the vice chief, he talked about the fact that if i have the first dollar i get new dollar i get needs to go to readiness. The good news is the fy 18 budget has about 9. 7 billion in the Fleet Maintenance accounts to do maintenance on our ships and thats good. We need that. Although as i tell the folks we have the resources we asked for now its over to us to deliver. It is important that when you talk about maintenance it is not just resources. Im quick to point out its not just about money and not just about adding more people. Clearly, the 9. 7 billion that we get is going to help us. We need to grow the size of the Naval Shipyards. We are going to grow it to 36,100. Thats where we need to be to deliver the nuclear submeans on time. We are not doing a good job of that. We have had a better year on the carrierside, but 12 of those 17 submarines are behind and we have to turn that around. And so people will help. Certainly the capacity piece of that is important but its not the only piece of it Going Forward. The Number One Mission priority is the delivery of submarines. And the reason its the number one priority is because of the 235 ships i have today a third of them are at nav cs control. So to the extent that we dont get them out on time it causes a great stress on the force. There was an article in january or february where a reporter said that the u. S. Navy for the first time did not have an Aircraft Carrier at sea. Since the First Time Since world war i that we didnt have an Aircraft Carrier at sea. That is a startling statement. Part of that is because we were done to 10 carriers, but another part of that was because the george h. W. Bush took 13 months when it was supposed to take eight months. It wasnt lost on me that navseas ability to get them out on time is critically important. To resetting the fleet and getting the fleet to the size of the free throw thleet that we n. Back to my original comment, we need more people, but it cannot be only about the people. Theres a couple other things we have to do here. Wurngs i got to have the capacity to do the work. And then i have to figure out new ways to train the work force. Kids learn differently than we learned. And the typical time line to get a trained worker by the time you get them in the door to the time they can do something useful is about five years. We got to cut that back. And new training methods so we can have someone turn a wrench and do something useful in two to three years versus five years. We have to think differently about how we train the young men and women coming in today because they learn differently than we do. We need to make an investment in the ship yards to get the work done more productively than to day. Many of our shipyards, some of them are several hundredshipyma them are several hundred years old. They were designed to ships early 20th century and not set up to handle maintenance the way they should be. In terms of capital, improvements in the yard, we make investments in the equipment and place equipment on the order about every 20 to 25 years, the Industry Standard is 10 to 15 years. I have buildings over a hundred years old that i cant get work done. Weve gotta make a concert effort to look at how to set the yards up and have to make investments in our Naval Shipyards to get the work done more productively Going Forward. Finally, youve heard kevin mccoy talk about this many years ago. Weve gotta take the entire Industrial Base into account he here. We do have capacity other places when we dont have the capacity to do the work at our yards. And this one concept we talked about ten years ago is something were going to have to take a seriously look at again. Were getting significant help from eb and hi on submarine news and were going to need that Going Forward. We got a lot of challenges ahead of us, but from the maintenance side of the house, im very encouraged where were headed. We got the resources that we need, a Firm Strategy Going Forward and well start delivering ships and submarines on time and take a look at how we extended the lives of ships that we have. When you combine those two things together and add that into the built strategy that were going to have, we have a viable forwapath to 355 and may getting there sooner by otherwise just building new. Ill conclude my remarks and be happy to take any questions that you might have. Well, thank you for those remarks and for the audience and for our guest speaker, well start with a few questions up here and then open it up. Well get a discussion going and have plenty of interaction. You know, you mentioned, admiral, that theres this tension between readiness today and build for the future, and you can go back all those 18 ponds or whatever you said you worked on, ask that was probably there on the first one and its probably there today. But one thing that sticks out is the gap maybe widened more than four. The fleets have been running at a very high tempo. You did mention the fleet response plan, but that made more of the fleet more available for tasking. And you mentioned the bilau report, didnt mention it by name, but have we caught up enough . Back in 2008, 2009, corrections were put in place, but it strikes me that both from a maintenance standpoint and from a need for modernization, things are pretty tightly wrapped and its a pretty tough its pretty tough to catch up. How caught up are we . Are you satisfied . And maybe you dont agree with the premise, but i think its a particularly challenging scenario. Well, i think we have made major gains to catch up. I dont think weve completely dug ourselves out of the hole. And we have some numbers over here, i think they would tell you that the recent trends on this is a graded event. Graded event, okay. The navy gonna okay pass for land. Theres a couple aviators out there that got that. I think weve closed the gap. Were almost there, but its one of those things that as we saw before, if you dont once you get there, if you dont then consistently maintain the funding that you can rapidly lose the edge that you had. And i think thats particularly important when you talk about the ofrp, because ofrp was built and they put maintenance at the front for a reason. It was in recognition that you gotta get the maintenance debut. So were off doing that, but i think the other thing about ofrp, and were having these discussions, the ofrp was designed really to provide more force. So youll hear admiral davis talk about it. Its designed to do a couple things, reset the force, provide Power Forward in a rotational manner, but its also meant to provide surge capacity. And i think we havent you know, we havent yet tapped into the surge piece of it. And were likely to see more use of, for instance, an Aircraft Carrier when shes in a 36month cycle if she has a sixmonth maintenance availability, and then she works up for eight to ten months, you know, shes got a significant period of time. You send her on a sevenmonth deployment and come back, wed like to continue to use her again. I think were going to go look at, you know, weve made the investment in the maintenance, were going on get the use out of the platforms. But as you go use the platforms, youll consume the service life out of them and it circles back to the important of your point at the beginning. If were going to use ofrp and make the forces available, it makes it even more important to go to the maintenance. Because theres a direct correlation between how much you use them and how much maintenance you have to do. One of the interesting things we found, in the post 9 11 era, even though the total number of steaming days of the fleet didnt change dramatically, but 40 more deployed days than before. Its like running your car across church or across country. We were running the car across country more often and had to do more maintenance on it. You mentioned that, the ship yards and the need to recapitalize. A lot of that infrastructure you can go up to kitering, maine, and see buildings that are over a hundred years old. So if thats important, is there money budgeted for the recap . You mentioned that you got maintenance money. Are you allowed to apply that to efficiencies and upgrades to the facilities and the capacity you have . I have limited authority to take that money to do that. One of the things ive been working at and had serious discussions and frankly defense committees have been very open about having a discussion about providing more flexibility on that . With some controls on the use of that money to make some of the investments we need. On the same side, the milcon side of the house, its relatively small. We need to compete for those dollars as well. And were laying out a longterm Investment Strategy for the Naval Shipyards. They specifically asked me, whats the plan . This gets back to my original comment, which is were just throwing more money and people at the problem by itself is not going to make us more productive. It will help, but theres a number of other elements to the productivity piece and one is making the necessary investment in capital equipment, in welding machines, et cetera, but also in providing shops that are if you go and get your done, it flows, the materials flows the work into the ship better than we do today. One, we dont make the investments we need to make today. Thats pretty clear. We meet the 6 threshold mandated by congress, but thats kind of a hold what you got and well have to take a serious look at what it takes to invest in the shipyards particularly to flow the size of the fleet. The Naval Shipyard today can handle the 275 ships, but if youre talked dried options, shots and throughput for 355 ships, now you have a completely different issue. I agree. But just to get back to capacity issue, you have a lot of folks out here who are working in industry. Youve highlighted your remarks that the 18, as far as the next proposed budget, it came down on focusing nearterm readiness. Makes sense to a degree, but there was a lot of people who were expecting a little bit more. Its the same number of ships in the ship count for 18 as there were in previous administrations budget. Are there things that you are looking at . And are there things that industry should be looking at as you lay in for the ramp up to 355 . So 18 is a readiness year, but what should they be looking at . I think that Going Forward, weve laid out where we want to head. I would tell industry the key is, we want to keep our production lines going. We want to, with the new frigate or future service combatant, we need to look at ways to stream the acquisition process. The new buzz word is set base design is a way to kind of take the options and get through the early design of the ship is going to look at. I think industry is partnering well with us in that area. But its going to be a combination of continuing to build dg 51s and innovating and figuring out how we can build quicker for the next set of ships that are going to come down the pipe. Were continuing Building Four plus carriers. Wed like to get to 12. That would change build centers from 5 to 4. Thats one of the things were looking to do. And on the service side of the house, we have a number of ongoing efforts that i think well yield dividends Going Forward. But well have to continue to make the case on the budget side of the house for the resources necessary to get that done. And you know, thats obviously challenging in the environment that were in today. And i think youll see with the 19 budget and beyond that were laying out a compelling case for the side of the fleet we need and what its going to cost Going Forward. You mentioned capacity also in terms of people. And you also mentioned maybe the, you know, dusting off kevin mccoys, you know, one Shipyard Concept. Are we seeing strain in competing for the same people . A couple observations is that what we found with the sequester, the fiscal cliff, and some of the wild swings was that we were turning on and off veils and when you went to find the person with the skill set, they werent there, or you had to pay more. And then last i saw and you have the latest, that you were still a little short on the government side of hiring the shipyard workers. Yeah. You had a goal through 16 of having 16 more than you have on board. Are we eating yourself on this, and is there a better way to do this . Well, there is some tension in the nearterm. We do compete for resources with other industries. So when we have the downturns, we tend to lose the workforce, shortterm. But to your question, can we get the workforce necessary to go build the ships that we need and do the maintenance . The answer to that is yes. Weve had that in the past. You know, when i started Ships Company in the 90s, newport news had 27,500 workers. And norfolk was up in the 30,000s at her peak. So weve got to provide, you know, a package of things that would interest the young people to come work at the Naval Shipyard. We do compete for some of those people. So in the shortterm, we grab people they would like to have and vice versa, but if theres a stable, predictable plan out there and we know were going to grow the size of the force, when i talk to the leaders of industry, theyre not worried they can grow. Theyll work for us. And im not worried that well have a problem growing the size of the naval ship yards as well. I think weve got a good plan out there and well be able to press on with that Going Forward. Last question before we open it up to the audience. You mentioned the good news is, we got a big bump up in o m, operations and maintenance money, to do maintenance near term. Whats the next big thing past that, that you would like to see more investment from a prioritiesation standpoint, where do you need the most help . If admiral moran got his 19. 8 billion, whats the next dollar go to . Yeah, so i think, in my lane, on the maintenance side of the house, the next dollar goes into investing in the ship yards. Making the investments necessary to go make the workforce more productive. You know, theres an expectation, a correct expectation from the cno that once you get the workforce you need, we expect you to get better. One of the challenges we face today as weve added a significant number of people in Naval Shipyards over the last six to seven years, is that i have a pretty young workforce. Half the people have been there less than five years. Obviously as we add another 2,000 people over the next two years, that trend is gonna thats not going to change significantly. So weve got to recognize weve got a young workforce, and weve got to go train them to become more productive and weve got to provide facilities to become more productive. Because the expectation is correct, which is, hey, im going to give you the people and the dollars, but i gotta at the end of the day, i need some of those dollars to build ships and planes and weapons as well. So once you get that workforce trained and its there, i expect you to be able to figure out how to do 250,000 mandate for 230,000, for example. So my next dollar would go into investments in the physical plan of the Naval Shipyards to make them more productive so that we can ultimately start tipping that budget over a little bit and let the resources go somewhere else, where theyre needed. Thank you. Okay, lets open it up. Well have a few folks here. We can just call on you. Sydney, you get the first question. Ask you to identify yourselves and ask a question. For everyone whos not thoroughly sick of me, sydney freedberg, breaking defense. You said some interesting things about how we invest in maintenance and extending the service lives of our current ships, we can get to 355 a lot faster. Theres a big return on investment for that. Id love you to walk through some of the details and the numbers on that, you know, how much life are you thinking of getting out of what ships . Can every r. Lee bird get five more years, or is it much more nuanced across the blocks . And what are sort of your bestcase, middlecase, and worsecase scenario for how much time you can bring that 355 goal to the present. Yeah, the answer to the question, yeah, i think it applies to all the articley bird ships that have vertical launch. Were not going back to some of the earlier ones. But the study has looked at basically from dg, maybe 53 or 54, but it essentially applies to all the arly birds, with the exception of tyco and yorktown and gates. How much service life can you get out of them . Certainly at least five more years. Weve taken a look at it, im convinced on the nasy side of the house, extremely lowrisk. Weve kinda looked at it from the i think you could at least get it out to its next dry docking. In many case, its beyond. With relatively lowrisk and low cost. Do the modernization and have a baseline you would like to have. For aegis, we have an idea on the c 4 i side of the house. I think its a lowrisk proposition. Running the numbers, i think you could probably shave 10 to 15 years off the what it would take you to get to 355, if youre willing to consider the entire fleet in that set. Obviously thats not im not the decisionmaker on that, but from the technical side of the house, nav sea doesnt see anything technically that would prohibit us from extending the service life of the ships. Again, do the maintenance and the modernization so theyre combat relevant Going Forward. And we know how to do that. So i dont think this is something that were leaning that far forward on technically. I think its pretty straightforward. I will say, on the aluminum hull side of the house, we dont have as much Knowledge Based on aluminum hulls and how they react over time. Weve seen some of the challenges with just the aluminum structures on the cruisers. So im not willing to go lean forward yet on how far we could get the aluminum hull ships which have a 25year service life. But on the steel hull side, theres no technical issue going longer. The nuclear side of the house, carols will stay 50 and the ssns have a whole series of separate issues. I think weve probably sharpened our pencils and the ssns are where they need to be today. So what im looking at is on the surface ships out of the house. The submarine force is pretty well understood how long we can take those out based on propulsion plan issues and issued associated with the hull from diving and safely operate and submerge. Can i just jump in here, to hit one on cyber. Yes. We think of other commands as having the lead on cyber, but for the force in being and the force that youre building, nav sea has a huge challenge here. Can you talk a little bit about the special efforts required in that arena to become cyber compliant and secure . Thats a great question. I probably should have mentioned that in my remarks. I would say as part of this effort to extend the service life of existing ship, when i talk about modernization, cyber is a key piece of that. A lot of people think space war, because they dont know the i. T. Systems. Nav sea, im responsible for all the hm e systems from a cyber perspective. Weve got to stay out in front of that. Ontime delivery of ships and submarines, culture of portability and number three is cyb cyber for very good reason. The wannacry stuff gets our attention pretty quickly. The reality of it is, our ships and submarines today, theres not a combat system on that ship that doesnt have, thats not heavily invested in software and computers. I just came from riding the trials on gerald r. Ford, magnificent ship with a machinery control system that allows you to take a thousand people off that ship that operates remotely and not having to have sound and security watches some of the things we did in our earlier days. Thats great stuff, but all that stuff has computers associated with it. So the cyber piece is not just, dont hack into my email or get into my credit card, it goes a lot further than that on the ships today. We on the nav seaside of the house, we have a big focus on how do we go manage this Going Forward. Have you had to set up any new Staff Organization or bring on new folks to deal with that . Yeah, we have. We stood up we have a chief Information Officer now, weve grown the size of my workforce there on the believe it or not, a lot of the cyber folks are in the engineering director and nav sea, a cyber counsel that i meet with monthly. And were working on standards and tenth fleet on that. So as we grow nav sea and we would have to grow nav sea, if we grow the size of the force and were looking closely at the cyber piece of that. Thats a key point. More questions. Megan, you had your hand up earlier. Go ahead. No, right here. Ill ask you about the public shipyards. You mentioned trying to get the same maintenance availabilities done with fewer man hours. I was wondering if that would come as a result of upgrading the yard infrastructure like you mentioned or if that would take some meaty rethinking how you approached the processes, how you innovate the procedures . Yeah, i think its a combination of all of those things. So, one, if youve ever been i use ingels as an example after hurricane katrina, we had the opportunity to rebuild. And obviously katrina was a terrible blow to the gulf coast down there, but when they had the opportunity to rebuild the facilities and kinda rethink how they made things out, you look at how ingels is performing today on the new Construction Side of the house, theyre knocking it out of the park. So anybody that does Industrial Engineering would tell you how your shops are set up and how you flow material can go a long way towards cutting making you more productive. The second piece of it is the workers that are coming in today and training them and providing them with Training Facilities to get them up to speed quicker and then providing them with the tools to be more productive. I think one of the things we tend to be a pretty conservative organization on how we use technology. And theres great opportunity out there, i think, to use technology, including cell phones, et cetera. Theres Security Issues with them, that would allow us to be more productive at the deck plate. Todays kids learn a lot different. Theyre not used to throwing a drawing on the table. Theyre well versed on taking an app on a phone and looking at a drawing or taking a picture of something on the ship and then pushing a button and having the material delivered to them. So theres a lot of opportunity here for us to get more productive that goes well beyond just adding people to the shipyards. Will the government work rules that we have today allow you to take full advantage of that . Is that another thing to put on the pile . Yeah, its another thing to put on the pile. Were fairly conservative about our use of new technology. But we get there eventually. And if you go look at the floor today, we do things today that we wouldnt when i started back in 1981 they would never have imagined we would have allowed ourselves to do. So its a recognition that you have to embrace the technology. It comes with risk, particularly on the cyber side of the house, but if you dont recognize that this is the way people learn and this is the way we move information, i think were missing a great opportunity to get better quicker than we would otherwise. Right here in the front on the end there. You mentioned the longterm plan for the public shipyards. Could you please be more specific about what youre assessing in terms of investments and people . Yeah. And when do you anticipate the study to wrap up . And is that study congressionally mandated or something the navy is doing its not congressionally mandated. This is something that ive asked for and the c os asked for. They did this on their own a couple years ago, hired an industrial engineer to look at the layout, and how work flows and they mapped out where people had to walk to between the shops. So they were able to go put that on the plate and they showed that to me when i came in last year. I was very interested in that. So weve made an investment to go out and do the same thing at the other three shipyards to get a formal industrial engineer to look at it, map out the shops, where do people have to walk to to get the work done. And if you were to optimize that, what would you do . So a combination of that and ten Capital Improvements on the facilities themselves, in terms of welding machines, et cetera. And the last piece of that is the dry docks. As we go to virginia payload module, to block five, you know, the submarines wont fit in a lot of the existing dry docks. And four class carriers use 13. 8 kva power on the pier and have different cooling requirements. So weve gotta upgrade the docks for those as well. So we have a longterm plan, Investment Plan that ive shown to the cno, and that includes the dry docks and the facilities investments necessary to get there. Its not cheap. Were talking youre talking on the dry dock side of the house, probably over the next 30 years, an investment of on the order of 3 to 4 billion necessary to make the dry docks compatible. Those are kind of musthaves. If you want to have virginia class submarines and you want four class care yerds, youre going to have to upgrade your dry docks. The second piece to that is the one where im competing with everybody else for the dollars which is to make the investments necessary in the shipyard. So, yes, that plan, we have the basic outlines of it, i owed cno an answer back in the fall, and i think it will finish up in, probably february of the next year. I think ill have a bow on this thing wrapped up and well lay out where i think we need to go from a nav sea perspective. Im having this conversation with the defense communities as well. Theyre very supportive and want to help on this particular. Ill move it over here. Sir . Hi there, im mike stone from reuters. Thanks for coming in. You talked a little bit about frigate and delivery and keeping costs down. I wanted to understand how much time nav sea would need with a four end design frigate in terms of survivability systems, and breaking that down . And if you can answer that, how would that compare to domestic design. I dont know that would take you know, i dont know, i dont think it matters where the design comes from, in terms of who develops the design, as far as how long it would take us to evaluate it. You know, i think that the thought is here on Going Forward with the future frigate, it will be a competitive environment that will include a look across a Broad Spectrum and we could consider a foreign design as part of that competition. We havent obviously gotten to that point yet. But if we got to the point where we were considering those designs, it wont take nav sea any longer unless i gotta translate it from german or dutch or something to do the analysis in terms of the survivability of service. I dont think theres any time difference in terms of where the design comes from. Okay, this gentleman right here on the end. Pass your mike. Thank you. Rick burgess, sea power magazine. Admiral, the nimitz class is halfway through its rcoh cycles. Is the ford designed to have an rcoh mid life and if so, will there be a gap between the next nimitz and the ford going in for rcoh . Yeah, the ford life is designed for mid refueling as well. You know, we looked at what it would take to get to life of ship 50 for a four class and i think we concluded that while technologically feasible, it didnt make sense from a cost standpoint. If youre going to keep the ship for 50 years, you gotta bring it in to a mid life overhaul anyway. And the refueling portion is only about 10 . Its not the critical pass. So we concluded it made sense to keep the refueling in there. So we will refuel the ford class. Let me do the math in my head here. Yesterday, shell be around for 50 years. Would be in 2040. Add 23 years to that. So, lets see, the last bush was the last nimitz classed and she will be around until 2057. So her mid life refueling, never do math in public is what my staff tells me, is in 2030. So there will be a little bit of a gap in the refueling program between when we refuel the last of the nimitz class and when we would do ford. Essentially the gaps going to be, we delivered bush in 2008 09. And ford in 2017. So there will be an eightyear gap between the refuelings and have to address that when we get there. There will be activities to counterbalance, if youre new ship building in the 2040, 2050 time frame, that would counter some of the loss of work in the rcoh program. Okay, over here on the right. Admiral daly, good evening. Rob alameda from rollsroyce. A lot of what you spoke about this morning, sounds like a huge data problem in a lot of ways. Particularly when it comes to, what i see, i see two data sets. One being stuff coming off of obm equipment, whether it be a rollsroyce turbine. We have a huge amount coming off the turbines that fly through the sky in the commercial world. We provide an insightful way to do protective maintenance on the aviation side. Thats commercial application. Within the navy theres a lot of other datea that can come off the ship, worried about the custodian is the u. S. Navy and you may have information coming off oem equipment that is owned by, say, the oem. If youre trying to bring this information together and gain insights from it, how do you see handling that . I mean, we talked about cyber, but how do we handle who owns the data . Who protect its . And w protects it . And who is able to interpret in a way that allows to you gain efficiencies . So, one, im a big believer the navy should own the data Going Forward. And youre right, we have a lot of data coming off our ships today. We frankly dont make great use of it. You talked about rollsroyce engines. The Navy Leadership has been up to General Electric to see what theyre doing in what they call digital twins and the digital age and making decisions. I think thats a direction that we are absolutely need to head in. So i have, on surface ships today, i have a system called ikas. Weve had the ability to collect data for years. Frankly, we dont do a lot with the data to help us make decisions. But as we go to some of the systems we have today, like the fords class machinery control system, we have the ability to collect vibration data and temperature and stuff. And we have to take a step forward and become more mature in the use of that data. The cno is driving us to go figure out how to make use of the big data to make better decisions Going Forward. Its across a whole host of different applications in my world, on the maintenance side of the house, how do you use data to make better decisions about what you do maintenance and what type of maintenance do you do. The commercial industry is light years ahead of us in that particular area and weve gotta get better at it. But to the data portion of it, you know, we need to get oot navy needs to own the data so that we can make some integrated decisions about what were going to do. Okay, right up here, up front. Well get you a mike. Thank you, admiral. John harper with National Defense magazine. As you grow the size of the fleet and extend service lives, how much do you anticipate that o and m cost will be affected as you get to the 355 . And are you concerned that will eat into the money for procurement and new builds . Well, clearly, like a car, in our experience with, say, enterprise, or nimitz is now 42 years old, they do take a little bit more maintenance towards the end of their life. So but if youre going to get to 355 ships, you gotta recognize up front youre going to have a higher o m cost. If youre going into it thinking you can grow the fleet by 80 ships and those costs arent going to go up, youve got a problem. So i think we recognize that the costs are going to go up. Theyre a little bit higher towards the last stages of a ship, but theyre not astronomically higher in the nimitz class. But part of the way that you can keep those costs under control is to make it a consistent investment and do the maintenance throughout the life of the ship. What weve found on the nimitz class is when you do the maintenance consistently in accordance with the plan, that you dont get any major anomalies. When you dont, then you have problems. So, you know, the classic example for us is theodore roosevelt, as we transitioned many years ago from a maintenance structure that we used to have into what we call today the incremental Maintenance Plan, most of the carriers got a complex overhaul to reset them. And tr missed out on that. So when she got into her mid life refueling, if you were to look at how many mandates should she have had at 23 years, she had fewer man days of work done on her in her first 22 years of life. Than the first three did coming in, and 72 as well. We had a very rechallenging refueling overhaul. Not surprising. So i think youve got to yes, it will cost you a little bit more towards the end of life, and we gotta factor that into our plans. But the key is consistent application of the Maintenance Plan and make the investments necessary on a regular basis to do the maintenance. If you do that, then you wont have these major things in the last 5 to 10 years in the ships life. Thats our experience. [ inaudible question ] i mean, you gotta do both, as i said at the beginning. You have to do the procurement and you have to do the maintenance. If anybody thinks we can get to 355 without having growth in both of those accounts, you know, theyre living in la la land, because thats not going to happen. Weve gotta factor both of those in to the equation and weve got to have an upfront, honest discussion about the budget. But if you want to get to 355, you gotta do both. You gotta build and you gotta maintain. If you skip on one of them, which has been our history, to stop on the maintenance, then you run yourself into trouble. If were committed to 355 ships, weve gotta be willing to make the investment on the maintenance side as well. We have to do that eyes wide open. I think one of the things back on the new Construction Side of the house that we dont pay enough attention to is, be willing to spend a little more money up front so the total Ownership Costs over the ship over the rest of its life comes down. We dont tend to make those investments because the way the budget works, the bull year youre in matters and maybe the next budget year, but its pretty hard for people to make investments today that are going to save you money, 10, 15, 20 years down the road. Weve got to take a more total Ownership Cost perspective as we get into the next round of ships and be willing to make that investment. The ford class, for all the talk about the how much the first ship cost, we did make an investment in that ship that would, you know, save 4 billion per ship over 50 years compared to a nimitzclass carrier. And so thats a significant savings. And while people may not be interested in that 4 billion savings today when theyre struggling to balance the budget and build ships. I guarantee you if youre a fleet commander 15, 20 years from now and youve got several ford class carriers out there and the Maintenance Cost for those ships are less than nimitz, youre going to be happy that whoever was building the ford in 2008 was smart enough to make the investments up front to reduce manpower and improve the maintenance reliability of the ship. Okay, on the end right there. Toby hirkshaw from bloomberg view. You mentioned briefly that this modernization of the shipyards had to happen on the private side as well as the public. You went into great detail on what youre doing in your four yards. But short of hoping for another hurricane, what do you do to make sure that the private side invests as much money in that as you guys are . Well, so obviously were not going to root for another hurricane. I think if you go look at the Ship Builders today, im satisfied theyre making the investments that they need to make. If you can go look at electric boat and newport news ship building today, some of the things that theyre doing to build facilities that would allow more work to be done inside, they have a thing called the unit outfitting hull, which would allow them to get more work for columbia and do fourclass carrier work inside. The challenge on my side of the house, the private sector is incentivized to make those investments because it makes them more profitable Going Forward. And so were willing to, and we have been in contracts on the new Construction Side, been willing to partner with them and share some of those costs, if theyre willing to make those investments, kind of in a cap x environment. Im satisfied that the yards today that are out there, competing for work, are making the investments necessary to keep those yards competitive. Thats one of the great things about competition. If the competition incentivizes them to make the changes to make them more profitable. On my side, im not out to make a profit. Whats the incentive for me to make investments in the yard . I need something along i need that same type of thinking. To me, the investment is, i get more productive and therefore i spend less omen dollars back to this gentlemans question up front, less maintenance dollars in the future so theres more money available for procurement. Okay, question here in the center. Admiral shannon . Good to see you. Good morning, sir, jim shannon, Naval Academy class of 1981. Thats what im representing today. You made a point earlier about a resource constrained budget. If you could explain a little bit more about that, taking into consideration your service on the staff of then four, the role you played then on getting the maintenance dollars increased for after you left in four. And what are you seeing today among the resource sponsors . Does n four play that role or has it shifted to n nine, and how does that impact you and your budget . Well, were clearly we clearly always have more requirements than we have dollars. I dont think thats new today. It may be tighter, the gap may be bigger, but weve always faced that challenge. You know, the organization the dot Net Organization today places more of a role on managing the dollars with the nine organization. N four still plays a role in assessing the requirements. I think the process is more transparent and open than ive seen it in the past. So you need to im going to get quoted on this, but the it doesnt operate sometimes in an enterprise fashion. Theyre pretty much focused on surface ships. I builtin advocacy . Yeah, so theyre the advocates for that. So they tend to advocate for that. And so, you know, i think what were trying to get after is, you know, an enterprise look that says, hey, where should the next dollar go to make the most impact for the navy . I think the n nine organization in concert with eight, what ive seen today in my 18 years in d. C. , that its as good as its ever been. And we are having that open discussion in kind of a Corporate Board manner, if you would, to decide where is the money going to go . What are the specific trades . You know, what happens if you put the dollar here . You know, what happens, what dont we do . Instead of winners and losers, its really more of a, you know, getting back to the cnos constant question, whats the navy we need . And so i think were trying to work pretty hard to optimize the resources we have to get to the navy we need. So im satisfied that the processes that we have today, and were always tweaking it and fine tuning it to make it better, its pretty good and pretty robust. And the Navy Leadership we have over on the s1 side is doing a terrific job of, i think, managing that and i think everybody gets a voice in the process. As a result, i think we have a better outcome. We just have a few seconds left, and i see general gregson in the front row. So i have to ask this question. You know, there was some concern that especially the amfibs had not received the love and attention that they need. We talked about the surface navy. But within the surface navy, youve got the assets which are very large, very complex, and important. Could you talk a little bit about recovering their readiness and are you satisfied and the cross talk between the navy and the marines on that . Well, ive got a marine on my staff who manages amphibious ships for me, the c 21 staff which does maintenance, talking to the marine corps all the time. N 95 is a strong advocate for the amphibious warfare branch. Where there may have been in the past a tendency to place resources on the nuclear side of the house, and the nuclear side of the house today, we have robust Maintenance Plans across the board. And we understand the service life requirements of the amphibious ships, starting with lp17, theyre being well maintained today. Were about ready to finish up maintenance in norfolk, and shes going to be a ship. Im satisfied were making i dont see any indication theyre the last in line for the maintenance dollars. You just mentioned wasp, she had to sit out because she had an obsolete combat direction system. Thats an example of recovery. Its a good one. Wasp is, she just came back from deployment at the end of 2016, and we immediately threw her into our availability to get her ready to go be an fdnf ship and the contractor and crew have done extremely well. Were close to getting her out of there. Shell get over to japan and do great things over there. Thwell, thank you. Were going to have to cut it here, but we want to thank admiral moore for giving his remarks today and giving us the time he gave us for questions. Hes a very busy man with a lot on his plate. Like to also mention one more time, our thanks for the generosity of our sponsors Lockheed Martin and huntington ingels industries without whom we couldnt bring you that Maritime Security dialogue. So we thank you and thank our audience and thank our speaker again today. Sure. Lets give him a hand. [ applause ] [ indistinct chatter ]. As we go look at that, well go through a process to use setbased design to the point where we see this is what we want. In fact, if we can just get an address, we can send out more details information on exactly what the set base design. Although if you google it, it will give you a pretty good answer. Great, thank you. You got the next question. Not right now. Okay, could i ask you something a little specific. You mentioned industry helping out with some of the attack submarine availabilities. I know boise is set to go to a private yard in 19. I was just wondering if you could say which yard thats going to and why it had to do 19 instead of 18 . Well, i cant tell you what yard because it will be competitively bid. So well see where that goes. Okay. 19 was where the capacity existed, thats really the reality. I didnt have the capacity in the shipyard. Hi to get money in 18 to start planning it and then the execution will be in 19. So it was more about where the capacity existed within the industry than anything else. Do you have any other attack submarines that are doing their full availabilities in a private yard, or is it just industry coming into the public yards to help out . No. So weve got montpelier up at electric boat right now, columbus is coming into newport news ship building. Boise will go to one of those two yards. We always Going Forward, we want to keep this on the table as an option. What i dont want, i want to prevent another boise. So as we grow the size of the workforce and look at all the submarine work we have on the plate, im trying to get out in front of this far enough in the advance to say, i dont have the capacity and then we can talk to industry quicker than we have done. If you look at the list of submarines out there, theres probably there are several cases where were looking in the future where we may have to go to industry earlier than weve done today. Okay, thank you. I wanted to ask you about the rcoh for the stennis. In the budget documents it said it was pushed to the right for ten months. Why is that . Is the George Washington going to take longer . No, g. W. Is not going to take any longer. Its going to start a year later, because it got in the we looked at whether we wanted to just inactivate her and youre aware of the discussions we went through in congress on that. So there was a couple things. One, the fleet needed her a little bit longer. And when g. W. Moved to the right, it created a significant overlap between the end of the George Washingtons availability and the start of the stenniss availability. So we looked closely at that overlap and so if you get too much of an overlap, then newport news would have been going class submarines, g. W. , stennis and 79 and 80. That looked like a workload peak that would going to be a recipe for i wont say disaster, but it would have caused some problems. So the fleet wanted to move it. It fit what the Industrial Base sneeded. So i would say its the model i would like to go to in the future on all these decisions. The decision was made on stennis years in advance. Thats where we need to get to. Look at the work we have, look at the fleets needs, the fleets needs come first, but if we can meet the fleets needs and theres a better way to level the work in the Naval Shipyards and the private sector, we ought to do that. Youll get the work done on time and youll get the work done cheaper if they can apply the resources in an optimal way. You mentioned moving away from the one Shipyard Concept when it comes to new builds. Did you have any particular classes of ships in mind for that . Im not sure. Moving away from the one ship yard . I thought you were saying for some ships theres one shipyard thats building. Maybe i misinterpreted what you said. That was on the maintenance side of the house, where we use the resources from the entire Industrial Base, like were doing today with montpelier in columbus, et cetera. And we use newport news when we do carrier availabilities. In terms of new construction, competition is always going to be what were striving to get. The only place we dont have competition is for our Aircraft Carriers, because theyre the only [ inaudible ] so were looking to maintain competition wherever we can. Are you looking to you mentioned service combatants extend service lives of amfibs across the board . Everything. Cgs, all your amphibious class ships, lcs and some of the comb combat logistics as well. So if its a ship and its floating today, were looking at extending the service life. When you talk about the aluminum hulls i dont want to presuppose the decision. All i said was, we dont have the Knowledge Base on how that hull performs over a long period of time like we do with steel. We know steel hulls. So what happens over 25 years, aluminum is doesnt quite have the tencel strength so youll have flexibility in the hull. Weve seen that with some of the cracking on the super structures. So theres issues with as you operate the ship, just from a stress standpoint and theres the only sensitization issue. So we gotta look pretty carefully. Well proceed more cautiously on extending the service life of aluminum hull ships than steel. And you said five years out of ddg in terms of amfib . Ive told them you can get five years out of everything with a steel hull and that you could probably get more. Last question . Going, going, thank you all very much. Thanks, everybody. Good to see you. [ indistinct chatter ]. Homeland security secretary john kelly is on capital hill tuesday to testify on the president s 2018 budget request for dhs. Thats happening before the Senate Homeland security and Governmental Affairs committee. Well have live coverage starting at 10 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan. And around the same time here on cspan3, well have another hearing on the president s 2018 budget request, with education secretary betsy devos. Well outline some of the priorities for her department. Again, that gets under way at 10 00 a. M. Eastern. Sunday night on afterwords, new America President and ceo ann marie slaughter examines global networking in the digital age in her book the chessboard and the web, strategies of connection in a network world. Miss slaughter is interviewed by dennis mcdonough, former white house chief of staff in the Obama Administration from 2013 to 2016. What would strike me was that we knew there was a world of states and state threats. Today if you think about north korea or iran or sometimes china and russia, that world of statetostate relations is still very, very important, and i think of it as the chessboard world. Because its the world of how do we essentially beat our adversaries, and we think about a move and we try to anticipate what move theyre going to make. And that world is there, and its very important. But equally important is what i call the world of the web. That world of criminal networks, including terrorists, but also arms traffickers and drug traffickers, the world of business, which increasingly big networks supply chains, global corporations, and the world of nongovernmental organizations. I think of all those actors as web actors, as increasingly important actors, but we dont have strategies for how to bring them together. Watch afterwords, sunday night at 9 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan 2s book tv. Montenegro is the latest country to join the nato alliance. On monday, the state department hosted a ceremony to mark the occasion. The event included the Prime Minister of montenegro and natos secretarygeneral jens sto stoltenberg. This is 25 minutes. [ applause ]